Can Giving Up Plaid and Hoodies Lead to a More Productive Life?

Before taking my daughter to preschool this morning, I changed my shoes ten times. I also made a special trip to the other side of town, when I should’ve been filing this story, to pick up a pair of glasses that I’d left at a friend’s house; I needed simple black frames, not something with color to them. There’s a decent chance that at some point today, I will go out of my way to get a pair of socks.

This would all be typical male vanity if not for the fact that I might go all day without talking to or being seen by another human being. I recently changed jobs; I went from having to show up every day in an office to working remotely with occasional trips to major cities. I could easily get by most days in sweats or no pants at all. I still firmly believe that other people have very little interest in the fine details of what you’re wearing. But in a lot of ways, we dress for others as much as we dress for ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong: Plaid is lovely. But it was holding me back.

Except it’s this kind of scenario that proves just how much we do dress for ourselves. If I put on an outfit that no one will ever see, am I still wearing clothes? This koan unravels pretty quickly—I’ll see myself in the mirror at least a dozen times today, and if what stares back doesn’t please me, it will send me into a spiral of self-doubt that destroys any chance I have at a productive day. We dress to reinforce who we want to be, or believe ourselves to be—even if some days, nobody but me will ever know the difference. And in this case, when everything is in flux, that difference really, really matters.

Change isn’t a disruption; it’s an opportunity, a chance to let go of everything and see what eventually finds its way back to you. It’s liberating, if a bit scary. And in my case, it’s a chance to break away from the tyranny of hoodies and plaid, the twin scourges of my style paradigm, one that I blame largely on living in Portland. Why does it matter where I live? Because we often dress passively; we dress the part. We look around and follow what seems to be working for others. It’s comfortable, even comforting. But it comes with a peculiar kind of self-loathing. You live every day knowing that you’re robbing yourself of real independence. If my life’s moving in the opposite direction, why would my clothes stay the same?

Thus began my one-man war on plaid and hoodies. Don’t get me wrong: Plaid is lovely. But it was holding me back. Clothes aren’t just objects; they’re metaphors. Plaid is a mish-mash, an optic puzzle. You can get lost in it and eat away hours trying to unravel its mysteries. Solids are, well, solid—the most basic of all basics, the fundamental DNA of fabric upon bodies. They’re building blocks, and they’re exactly what I want on my side as my professional life is in desperate need of order and structure. While I’m still vulnerable to plaid, I’m in a better place now because of solids.

You really need some options that don’t run the risk of making you look like you’re six—or a walking stereotype of some middle-aged creative type who spends all day trying to channel his inner enfant terrible.

Hoodies are a little more complicated. I slip up about once a week, in large part because the hoodie is just so functional in the Northwest, where there’s almost always a chill in the air. Somewhere on my computer I have a draft of a smitten ode to Reigning Champ that makes its hoodies sound more important to my daily life than bread or water. There’s also a long section in there on the cultural import of the hooded sweatshirt, which touches on subcultures, race and class, nostalgia, and the encapsulation of past, present, and future. But one of the reasons I’ve tried to ditch the hoodie is that I feel like I’ve figured it out to the point where I’ve exhausted it. It’s gone from something I wear to something that wears me. Oh, look, there goes that sweatshirt with that person in it. That and, at my age, you really need some options that don’t run the risk of making you look like you’re six—or a walking stereotype of some middle-aged creative type who spends all day trying to channel his inner enfant terrible.

I’m pretty sure that I’ll never be able to fully quit hoodies, because in the end I know them too well and they feel the same way about me. Plaid, though, is inessential; solids just make more sense for me at this point. I wouldn’t have figured any of this out if I’d just stopped giving a fuck about outfits these past few weeks. I know that hard-and-fast rules were made to be broken—I’m wearing plaid right now as I type—but again, it’s about what you want to see in the mirror every morning, even if you’re the only person looking. I’m not entirely sure yet what I want to see. I do know, though, that if I didn’t reassess some things, I’d be missing out.